—Innowatts, an AI-focused energy tech company in Houston, has closed an $18.2 million Series B funding round, according to a press release. The investment was led by Energy Impact Partners and included existing investors Shell Ventures, Iberdola, and Energy and Environment Fund (EEI Japan), as well as new investor Evergy Ventures. Innowatts’ technology is designed to help utilities provide a more personalized experience for their customers.

—Austin fintech company Liveoak Technologies has raised just under $7 million in funding, according to a filing with securities regulators. Founded in... Read more »

Houston—Men have long leveraged their networks to succeed in business, and the tech industry has been no exception. Women, finding themselves outside of the club, are now creating their own networks to do the same.

Katelyn O’Shaughnessy already had a solid track record, selling TripScope, a travel startup she co-founded in 2013, to Travefy two years ago. But when looking for funding for her second company, Doctours, she says, “I kept hearing, ‘I love your idea, but I’m not sure about you being CEO.’ ” The investors O’Shaughnessy was pitching didn’t believe she fit the profile of what they... Read more »

—Austin-based LiveOak Venture Partners is one of three organizations that led a $5 million investment in Imandra, an artificial intelligence startup based in London, according to a press release. With the funding, Imandra says it will open a US headquarters in the Texas state capital. Other investors were AlbionVC and IQ Capital, based in London and Cambridge, England, respectively. The four-year-old startup makes AI software with tools to measure safety, transparency, and fairness. Imandra says it plans to use the funds to develop technology for the financial services industry and... Read more »

Houston—A delegation led by the Bahraini oil minister was in town recently meeting with business and government leaders. It makes sense considering Houston is the birthplace of the fracking technology the Gulf country’s leaders are seeking.

A year ago, Bahrain discovered its largest trove of oil and gas—at least 80 million barrels of “tight oil”—since 1932, off its west coast. Extracting that crude, which is in shale formations deep below the earth’s surface, requires hydraulic fracturing with deep horizontal wells—a Houston specialty.

But one delegation member, Simon Galpin, also saw in this trip a chance to engage with... Read more »

—Newchip, an Austin online market of crowdfunded deals, has accepted 45 startups into its remote accelerator program, according to a press release. The startups, sorted by Newchip into seed, pre-seed, and MVP/beta stages, will go through the company’s 10-week program. Unlike many accelerators, Newchip doesn’t require that the companies give up equity to participate. In June, Newchip said it raised $2 million in seed funding from investors including SputnikATX, Youbi Capital, Polymath, and Yeoman.

—Chevron Technology Ventures Thursday launched a $90 million fund for energy investments. The fund is CTV’s seventh and investments will be made in high-growth startups with technologies that have the potential to improve Chevron’s core oil and gas business performance, says CTV President Barbara Burger. “We are using venture capital as a conduit for early access to innovation and to build a pipeline of innovation for Chevron,” Burger said in a press release. The announcement comes as the California energy giant celebrates the 20th anniversary of CTV, the statement said.... Read more »

What does it take for a tech startup to be considered “cool?” In the eyes of the San Diego Venture Group, the key element is readiness for venture capital backing.

It’s through that lens that the nonprofit organization, whose mission is to connect local startups with venture capitalists who are looking to invest, annually vets tech companies that apply for its “Cool Companies” program. Startups that are accepted are highlighted at SDVG events, including its well-attended annual Venture Summit, and, perhaps more enticingly, invited to a private meet-and-greet with a group of about 100 angel investors and VCs, some of whom... Read more »

Kyriba has been making cloud-based software since well before software-as-a-service (SaaS) became a tech buzzword.

Nearly 20 years ago, the company, a spin-off of a French firm, began developing software to provide chief financial officers and other finance leaders with a comprehensive view of company cash and liquidity. Now Kyriba, which sells access to its corporate treasury and financial management software on a subscription basis, says it has reached a preliminary agreement to sell a controlling stake in the company to London-based private equity firm Bridgepoint.

Under the deal terms, San Diego-based Kyriba would get $160 million and its management team... Read more »

—Pinpoint, an Austin startup that makes analytics tool to measure software engineering’s contribution to businesses, has raised $13.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Other investors include Storm Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Slack Fund, Social Capital, and Cherubic Ventures. The new money brings Pinpoint’s total funding to $16.5 million.

—A Texas-based startup will be among the participants at the Hatch Pitch competition at South By Southwest on March 11. Dallas-based Mambo is a website that enables users to find social activities around them based on their interests and preferences. Another startup in the contest... Read more »

Equidate, one of the trading platforms that help employees sell their shares in pre-IPO unicorn companies, rolled out a new name today and announced a $35 million expansion of its $50 million funding round publicized in July.

Re-branded as Forge Global, the five-year-old company plans to continue broadening the services it developed as many venture capital-backed companies—“unicorns” already supposedly worth billions of dollars, at least on paper—delayed going public, even while some of their staffers and earlier investors yearned for faster routes to cash out their shares.

By creating a secondary market for private shareholders, companies like Forge Global can... Read more »

Austin—[Updated and corrected, 2:36 p.m.] Dosh has added $40 million in new funding to further develop its mobile app that offers users cash back on certain purchases.

The money is Dosh’s Series B round of financing, and includes $20 million in equity financing and $20 million in venture debt. Goodwater Capital and Western Technology Investment led the funding for Austin, TX-based Dosh, and investors BAM Capital and Anthem Venture Partners also joined in the round. It follows a $44 million Series A round last April that was also led by Goodwater. Notably, PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL), the San Jose, CA-based payment... Read more »

The Ann Arbor, MI-based venture capital fund has invested an undisclosed amount in Allied Payment Network, which is located in Fort Wayne, IN. Plymouth partner Jeff Barry says the deal was valued in the “multi-millions.” Barry will join Allied’s board as part of the deal.

Allied is a financial technology company perhaps best known for marketing Picture Pay, software that allows users to take a photo of a bill or invoice and pay it from their mobile phones. The company has a range of bill payment services it offers... Read more »

The mega-deals keep on coming. Today, it’s a massive acquisition in financial technology: Fiserv has struck an agreement to acquire First Data in an all-stock transaction valued at $22 billion.

The deal has been approved by both companies’ boards but still needs to be accepted by shareholders and regulators. Assuming it closes as expected later this year, it would combine two big players in financial services and payments processing.

[Updated 1/22/19, 3:10 pm CT. See below.] When Propeller Health’s founders initially tried to raise funding for their new healthcare technology venture, many of the investors they spoke with were hesitant to take the risk.

It was the early part of this decade, and Propeller was navigating the FDA’s regulatory process for medical devices. The company believed it had a chance to become one of the first to earn market clearance from the agency for a software product, says Propeller co-founder and CEO David Van Sickle. Propeller’s idea for a so-called “digital therapeutic” involved equipping prescription inhalers with sensors... Read more »

It’s time to catch up on notable headlines from Wisconsin’s innovation community:

—Northwestern Mutual, the Milwaukee-based insurance and wealth management services giant, has hired Souheil Badran as chief innovation officer. Badran was previously president of the Americas region for Alipay, the online payments platform operated by Ant Financial, the Alibaba-owned fintech firm.

Badran’s new role was previously held by Alexa von Tobel, the well-known fintech entrepreneur who left Northwestern Mutual this month to become managing partner of Inspired Capital, an early-stage technology venture firm based in New York that is raising $200 million for its debut fund, according to... Read more »

Invest Michigan, an investment fund supported by the state-backed Michigan Strategic Fund, hit a major milestone at the end of 2018: it invested in its fiftieth company in four years.

Ann Arbor’s Spellbound, which has developed a therapeutic tool to help kids cope with illness and engage in treatment through augmented reality technology, received the funding. (The amount was not disclosed.)

Invest Michigan, which does early-stage investing and manages the Michigan Pre-Seed Fund II, has made a total of 93 investments since 2014 in those 50 companies, including follow-on funding.

The American workforce has moved significantly beyond what Dolly Parton was familiar with.

Instead of a set 40-hour, “9 to 5” work week, we have flextime, gig work, and digital nomads. Technology has allowed us to work at all hours and days—and maybe has us working too much.

But even with those changes, many aspects of how human resources departments interact with employees remain the same. Two Texas startups are attempting to use artificial intelligence and other software innovations to transform the HR department.

A pair of massive Boston-area investments from the Japanese SoftBank Group’s $100 billion Vision Fund, a moonshot power storage spinout from Alphabet’s X labs, and some local robotics moves are found in this week’s Boston technology news.

—Underscore VC, a Boston-based venture capital firm focused on early-stage tech startups, is capping off its second fund at $140 million. The firm announced the fund in May when it had raised $117 million. It will make investments in software applications and infrastructure, the firm says. It also announced Richard Dulude, one of its founders, has been promoted to partner.

Cambridge Mobile Telematics said Wednesday morning it has pulled in half a billion dollars in an investment from—you guessed it—the SoftBank Vision Fund. That’s Japan-based SoftBank Group’s reportedly $100 billion fund that has made waves in the venture capital world by cutting massive checks to companies across a variety of sectors.

Now, the fund has thrown its weight behind Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), which emerged in 2010 from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. In a press release, the... Read more »

Researchers are hopeful the industry’s next breakthroughs will enable A.I. to move beyond answering narrow queries to handling broader assignments. But getting there will require designing software that can “think” and communicate more like humans—big challenges that A.I. developers have worked toward since the field’s inception.